you can't just show up out of nowhere, steal people's land and enforce your concepts of land ownership on them. that was always illegal under british colonial law. even the fucking romans knew that was wrong, and the romans had some broader problems with right and wrong. the romans would have decided it was illegal, the british would have decided it was illegal and canada has upheld an ancient precedent in confirming it's illegal. something i learned recently is that the british adaptation of roman law was actually formulated by francis bacon in the early 17th century.

the unilateral imposition of european fiefdom concepts of land ownership on british columbia was always illegal. even according to the 1763 proclamation, it was illegal; the proclamation claims the land for the british, so that other european powers cannot claim it for themselves, but it also says that the indigenous groups have to sell the land to the crown, and can only sell it to the crown. it is a land claim, but it doesn't extinguish indigenous title.

it is absolutely baffling that the government in bc, which is supposed to be a left-wing government, is having difficulty with this. 

not only is it not new, it very well might be the oldest law in canada.

this really isn't difficult to understand.

british columbia is stolen land. there is no legal basis for canadian sovereignty over most of bc - the british just stole it from the indigenous groups. the closest thing to legal justification for canadian sovereignty over british columbia is the royal proclamation of 1763, where the british king unilaterally declared sovereignty over the west of north america, but this would be considered absurd if interpreted as modern law. that's it. there's nothing else to cite. it's that flimsy. in today's world, which is very far removed from the wild west of cowboys and indians, that theft has been recognized and understood as illegal. as such, the government has no legitimate legal basis for passing any laws in the region at all.

british columbia is technically an illegal occupation, under international law.

this is not new. it is not a result of the dripa. it did not develop over the last ten years. the indigenous groups have never accepted canadian sovereignty, and the courts recognized it decades before dripa. dripa developed out of a completely different process - it is international law. however, in some sense, dripa was also a codification of existing precedent. 

nor does bc need to reinvent the wheel here. eby is apparently simply ignorant of the development of this legal process in his own jurisdiction, which wrote the rules for how this developed elsewhere. there is actually a workable framework for indigenous title allodial land rights called the nis'gaa agreement. this has already been negotiated, and it's up to eby's government to pull their head out of their ass, enforce the rule of law and follow the framework.

the days of the wild west are over.

send eby the memo. he seems to have missed it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-dripa-crisis-point-9.7175559